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As Amy Hollywood,
Harvard scholar of Christian mysticism and medieval history, points
out, frequently mysticism—and thus mystical experience,
particularly—is denigrated by skeptical scholars through
psychoanalytical categories as simply constituting a form of
hysteria, among other possible natural disorders. “Most scholars who
have wanted to take mysticism seriously have, as a result of such
dismissive diagnoses, either avoided the term ‘hysteria’ entirely or
have reserved it for those figures seen as somehow marginal,
excessive, or troubling to standard religious categories.”30
Religious historian Moshe Sluhovsky, likewise, points to the
numerous “natural” diagnoses which are employed by many modern
scholars to dismiss the validity of mystical experiences, whether
divine or diabolical, especially reported experiences of
late-medieval and early-modern Europe. Such diagnoses include:
“insanity, hysteria, paralysis, imbecility, or epilepsy…”31
Yet Sluhovsky aptly explains that stereotyping Christians of past
centuries, particularly of early-modern Europe, as ignorant of
medical or psychological causes for abnormal (if not paranormal)
behavior constitutes an erroneous approach, if not an altogether
arrogant dismissal, obstructing serious study of such cases. Since
matters like hysteria and epilepsy were “all classifications of
afflictions that were not unfamiliar to early modern people” the
assumption “that medieval and early modern people were simply not
sophisticated enough to know the right meanings of the symptoms they
experienced and witnessed tells us more about modern scholarly
arrogance than about premodern ailments and healing techniques, or
about early modern configurations of the interactions with the
divine,” Sluhovsky concludes.32
Yet, again, this is what
makes the case of Medjugorje (and its support for Valtorta’s
revelations) so unique: by occurring in the contemporary society of
the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Medjugorje
apparitions have been able to be scrutinized by exhaustive medical
and scientific investigations unavailable to past
generations—instead of remaining untested and being prejudicially
dismissed by modern thinkers as constituting a case of hysteria,
fraud, or any other possible natural explanation. As the French
doctor Henri Joyeux, an internationally renowned physician and
Professor of Cancerology in the Faculty of Medicine at the
University of Montpellier, explained in regard to the timely
significance of the apparitions:
Ecstasy is seen as a sensory perception of
realities that are perceivable by and visible to the visionaries
but invisible to and unperceivable by all others and, in
particular, those who seek to understand. For the first time in
history science can study these facts as they unfold in Medjugorje
and not merely a posteriori. The most advanced medical
techniques and the most up-to-date photographic and
cinematographic techniques help us to reach the kernel of these
events in order to try to understand them.33
Thus the Medjugorje
visionaries have been tested for all of the natural symptoms which
are applied by skeptics to discredit mystical experience, passing
each time. Dr. Joyeux led a team of French physicians from the
University of Montpelier to examine the Medjugorje seers in ecstasy
during their daily apparitions of the Virgin, when the children
simultaneously fall to their knees and enter a visible trance.
This phenomenon takes place daily at the same time (5:45 pm in the
winter and 6:45 pm in the summer). Dr. Joyeux’s concluding report,
delivered in the spring of 1985, stated: “The ecstasies are not
pathological, nor is there any element of deceit. No scientific
discipline seems able to describe these phenomena.”34 He
explained that “these young people are healthy and there is no sign
of epilepsy, nor is it a sleep or dream state. It is neither a case
of pathological hallucination nor hallucination in the hearing or
sight faculties…It cannot be a cataleptic state, for during ecstasy
the facial muscles are operating in a normal way.”35 In
addition to medical findings, all psychiatric explanations were also
ruled out. The visionaries underwent immense psychological and
psychiatric testing. The results showed a group of perfectly healthy
young people. According to Dr. Joyeux’s report: “The visionaries
have no symptoms of anxiety or obsessional neurosis, phobic or
hysterical neurosis, hypochondriac/or psychosomatic neurosis, and
there is no indication of any psychosis. We can make these formal
statements in the light of detailed clinical examinations.”36
Dr. Philippe Loron, head of the Neurology Clinic at La Salpietre
Hospital in Paris who examined the visionaries himself in 1989,
concurred in his conclusion: “This is the first time that medical
science has been involved to such an extent in evaluating the
phenomenon of ecstasy. And, in the process, what was confirmed in
several ways was the moral and psychological integrity of the
visionaries.”37 After taking all of the examinations and
their findings into consideration, Dr. Joyeux had to conclude that
the experiences of the children at Medjugorje “do not belong to any
scientific denominations.”38
Additionally, in
September 1985, an Italian team of physicians and scientists from
Milan’s Mangiagalli Clinic also conducted important tests examining
the visionaries. One of the doctors was Michael Sabatini, a
psycho-pharmacologist from the faculty of Columbia University. Using
an algometer, an instrument used to measure the intensity of pain by
applying pressure to sensitive areas of the body, Dr. Sabatini
concluded that while experiencing their apparitions the children
were impervious to pain, alienated from the senses and significantly
disconnected from the physical world around them.39 The
algometer showed that “prior to the apparitional experience their
reaction to pain was normal (between 0.3 to 0.4 seconds), [yet]
during the apparition they did not perceive any pain.”40
The experiments, according to Dr. Sabatini, proved that the mystical
experiences were not the product of fraud nor deception. Moreover,
Dr. Luigi Frigerio, another member of the Italian team, explained
that these results combined with neurological testing, which
determined that the visionaries were not only awake but hyper-awake
during their ecstasies, presented a paradox that “cannot be
explained naturally, and thus can be only preternatural or
supernatural.”41 Likewise, Dr. Ludvik Stopar, a prominent
psychiatrist and parapsychologist who conducted numerous tests on
the visionaries years earlier, reached the same opinion in his
conclusion: “I had the impression of coming into contact with a
supernatural reality at Medjugorje.”42
Such facts—pointing to
the supernatural through scientific inquiry—have led to many
spiritual conversions, even of scientific skeptics, in the small
Bosnian village. Sullivan relates the story of Dr. Marco Margnelli,
a prominent Italian neurophysiologist and an ardent atheist who came
to Medjugorje in the summer of 1988 determined to expose the
apparitions as a fraud. An expert in altered states of
consciousness, Margnelli conducted an array of medical tests on the
visionaries in which he had to conclude that during their daily
apparitions the children did, in fact, enter into “a genuine state
of ecstasy” and adding: “we were certainly in the presence of an
extraordinary phenomenon.”43 Dr. Margnelli’s observations
have ranged from conducting medical investigations on the seers to
personally witnessing miraculous healings and strange supernatural
occurrences which, admittedly, left him bewildered and deeply
shaken. Dr. Margnelli described a sequence of events to which he had
been a witness at Medjugorje:
from the “synchronous
movements” of the visionaries [during apparitions] to the
apparently miraculous healing of a woman with leukemia. What had
affected him most deeply were the birds: During the late
afternoon, they would gather in the trees outside the rectory
where the seers shared their apparitions, chirping and cooing and
calling by the hundreds, at times deafeningly loud, until “they
suddenly and simultaneously all go silent as soon as the
apparition begins.” This “absolute silence of the birds” haunted
him, the doctor admitted.44 Thus, a “few weeks after
returning to Milan, Dr. Margnelli became a practicing Catholic.”45
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